Shareholder to New York Times: “You’re Willing to Offend the Catholics Because They’re Not Going to Come and Kill You”

Last month, the New York Times accepted and ran an advertisement which bashed religion, and asked Catholic readers to consider leaving the church. Such an advertisement in itself does not show the Times religious bias. What does however, is the fact that the same newspaper refused to run a similar ad that asked practicing Muslims to do the same.

The New York Times is being accused of having a double standard when it comes to questioning religion, after it ran an ad calling on Catholics to leave their church, but nixed an ad making the same plea to Muslims.

The newspaper published an ad from Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation on March 9 which asked Catholics, “why send your children to parochial schools to be indoctrinated into the next generation of obedient donors and voters?” The ad went on to call loyalty to the faith misplaced “after two decades of sex scandals involving preying priests, church complicity, collusion and cover-up going all the way to the top.”

But in a story first reported by The Daily Caller, when Pamela Geller, a blogger and executive director of Stop Islamization of America, offered the same $39,000 for the Old Gray Lady to run an ad making a similar appeal to Muslims, the newspaper passed.

“This shows the hypocrisy of The New York Times, the “gold standard” in journalism, and its willingness to kowtow to violent Islamic supremacist intimidation,” Geller told FoxNews.com.

Responding to the heat brought on by the blatant hypocrisy, the New York Times claimed that they opposed the anti-Muslim ad because it could jeopardize the safety of American troops.

“The fallout from running this ad now could put U.S. troops and/or civilians in the [Afghan] region in danger.”

Now however, one shareholder at the New York Times has openly criticized their double-standard operation by suggesting that it is the company’s own safety they are looking out for.

Cliff Kincaid, Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, and a shareholder in the company, confronted a group of executives at the Times annual shareholders meeting, accusing them of running the anti-Catholic ad because:

“You’re willing to offend the Catholics because they’re not going to come and kill you.”

That’s it in nutshell, is it not? The media is willing to report negatively about other religions, but refuse to cast a negative shadow on Islam. And fear is the overwhelming factor.

What the media should be doing is an introspection, asking themselves why they are afraid of offending Muslims. When they find that answer, maybe they can more accurately report on the events involving Islamic extremists.

Here is a larger excerpt from Kincaid’s report:

Speaking at the April 25 New York Times annual meeting, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of The New York Times Company, tried to justify the rejection of an ad calling attention to the alleged oppressive nature of the Islamic religion and the “vengeful, hateful and violent teachings” of Islam’s prophet. He said the ad might incite violence in the Middle East.

At the same time, he justified the placement of an anti-Catholic ad in The New York Times by saying, “We take political ads that we do not agree with. That is the nature of advocacy advertising.”

Representing Accuracy in Media, a shareholder in the company for the purpose of getting access to the annual meetings, I told Sulzberger, his executives and other Times shareholders, “You’re willing to offend the Catholics because they’re not going to come and kill you.”

The full-page, anti-Catholic ad ran on March 9 under the title “It’s time to quit the Catholic Church” and was sponsored by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. It showed a cartoon of a Catholic Bishop going berserk over a birth control pill and urged Catholics to leave the church.

The ad against radical Islam, designed to test the paper’s commitment to fairness and freedom of expression, had a cartoon of a radical Imam upset over a smoldering Koran. It was sponsored and signed by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer of Stop Islamization of Nations and the American Freedom Defense Initiative.

About the AuthorRusty Weiss

Rusty Weiss is a freelance journalist focusing on the conservative movement and its political agenda. He has been writing conservatively charged articles for several years in the upstate New York area, and his writings have appeared in the Daily Caller, American Thinker, FoxNews.com, Big Government, the Times Union, and the Troy Record. He is also Editor of one of the top conservative blogs of 2012, the Mental Recession.

Join the conversation!

We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, vulgarity, profanity, all caps, or discourteous behavior. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain a courteous and useful public environment where we can engage in reasonable discourse.